Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  Once inside, they barely acknowledged each other. Finally, Jorge emerged from the bedroom and Sara pushed him toward the kitchen. He disappeared and returned with four open bottles of cold beer, two in each hand, which he passed to the others silently, without looking at any of them. Sara pulled cold cuts from one of the bags and set them on the table, still wrapped.

  “This meeting is now called to order,” said Silvio loudly, banging down his beer, as though to establish through priority that it was he who had called it, and had the upper hand. The beer sloshed out of the bottle and drenched his hand, which he wiped on the tail of his shirt. The others looked back at him in silence. “I’ll tell you that Valerio and Lino will be here by tomorrow. They’re going with you, and I’m going home.”

  “You’re going now?” Sara addressed at Silvio with a look of confusion, which he brushed off.

  “Things have come up. You don’t know the eighth of it. But let’s just think about now.”

  “Valerio sounds good to me,” said Joaquim, looking up, straight at Silvio. “He’s a mediocre pilot, but a good sertanista. Lino, we’re going to have to leave behind.”

  “That’s not your decision to make,” Silvio said firmly, banging his beer on the table again for emphasis, after covering the top of the bottle with his thumb.

  “My guess is that it’s been ten years since you’ve been in the field,” said Joaquim quietly. “It takes working with someone to know who they are.”

  “And you think you know everyone and everything? You’ve been out there so long that you don’t have any idea what’s been going on in the world. In your world!” Silvio made a move to get up and pace, but thought better of it and sat back down. “Besides, aren’t you done with SPI?”

  “Not even on paper,” said Joaquim, laughing at himself. “Or at any rate, I can’t seem to stay that way. This is my mistake, and I need to do what I can to undo it. But that’s a different issue.”

  “I’m just going in to try to find Larry,” said Jorge, cutting in. “That’s all. You can come if you want to,”—here he addressed Joaquim—“but I’m leaving tomorrow morning, and I’ll be back by next week.” What he didn’t say was that the bag with the Pahqua coordinates was still missing, and that thinking back he hadn’t seen it at least since they’d left Paruqu.

  “Jorge, you’re not prepared,” said Joaquim, without a trace of irony. “I’ve been going through James’s papers, and I think I’ve figured out what’s going on. I’ve spoken with Oliviero, and with Marcelino Benara at the University. There’s a lot more we need to do.” He stopped to appraise Jorge, who was looking at his shoes. “We’re in sight of figuring out why your father died, and James too. Two different reasons, but probably connected in the end.”

  “I don’t need your academic experts to anoint me,” Jorge shot back, as though he was anticipating a different kind of attack, and it was too late to change course.

  “You know it wasn’t the Lamurii that killed your father. You’re clear on that, right? Do you know how many outsiders were murdered by Indians in the last thirty years? Probably less than ten. And do you know how many Indians have been killed by outsiders?”

  “As of last count, by which I mean yesterday,” Silvio interrupted him, “about sixty more than the day before.”

  Joaquim turned to look at him.

  “You have no idea what’s been going on out there,” said Silvio. “You just don’t know.”

  Joaquim started to respond to Silvio, but then thought better of it and turned instead to study Jorge’s face, which even in profile, betrayed his thoughts. “You don’t need to know what happened to your father. But I do, and so does he,” he said, with a nod toward Silvio.

  “Know what?” said Jorge.

  “And do you think Interior’s going to jump in and apprehend him if we don’t?” Silvio blurted out in Jorge’s direction before Joaquim had finished. “Do you think he’s going to do anything besides stir up trouble if we leave him out there? We’re not talking retribution here; we’re talking prevention, basic responsibility. We’re hanging by a thread. He’s going to make it look a whole lot worse for us!”

  “But what authority does SPI have to arrest someone?” Sara interjected. “It’s not law enforcement. It gets back to the mission of SPI.”

  “The mission of SPI is obvious, and it’s been obvious all along, if anyone cared to see it,” Jorge interjected. “The mission of SPI is to move tribes around to make it easy for Brazilians to take their lumber or their metals or their land without being killed. It’s to make deals that protect the financial interests of Brazilians by bilking Indians in a way that makes us look good. It has no power other than the power of the outlaw, and if you want to fight fire with fire, go ahead. All I’m going to do is get Larry out of there.”

  A silence fell over the room, which was broken by Silvio’s slow clapping. “I think finally somebody’s getting it right,” he said in a raspy voice, elated and angry and defeated at once.

  Joaquim allowed the silence to set for a time before starting in. “SPI is about justice. You can’t forget that. That’s what it was about all along, and that’s what it continues to be about, and we can’t let the Kamar Sodeises of the world subvert that basic fact. If it turns out that protecting tribes means protecting them from us, so be it. But without us, they’d have nobody. Without Orland and Claudio, there’d be no secure demarcation. How many years ago was that? Three? That opened up the world for us, and if we close the door, we have only ourselves to blame.”

  The others looked at each other and then down. No one spoke.

  While they were arguing, the room had grown dark. In their silence, the moon peeked out slowly over the roof of the house next door, throwing its beam across Jorge’s wooden floor. Without thinking, Jorge placed his foot beside the beam, adjusting it to make it parallel. Sara laced and unlaced her fingers. Joaquim ran his hand over his chin, realizing without thinking that he needed a shave. Silvio reached out and unwrapped the food. He took a piece of bread and the others suddenly jumped in after him in a rush, four pairs of hands pushing across each other for lunch-meat, finally finding an outlet for their desperation. Sara turned on the lights and they ate in silence, two, three sandwiches apiece.

  Finally, Silvio turned to Joaquim, his mouth still full. “You’re not going to build your great system of justice from the field,” he said, washing down his sandwich with a swig of warm beer.

  “Or from a desk in an office, or over lunch with politicos,” Joaquim shot back, toasting him with his own bottle. “Lino stays here.”

  CXI

  DESPITE THE OPEN book on his lap, Jorge wasn’t reading. Rather, it took all the energy he had to fight the waves of shame that broke against the pylons inside him, creating disruptions in his stomach. The elusive distinction between using others and being used was, at that moment, lost on him, with the unfortunate consequence that he was unsure as to the proper target of his resentment. While he worked his way down the list of people he knew, his mother, and Martina, and Joaquim, his father and his uncles and his long-lost grammar school friends, only James struck him as someone around whom he had never felt exploited, or had needed to make excuses. James had clearly relied on him—for his last ten years, he would accept no other pilot—but with a kind of delight in his skill that suggested pride rather than need. Perhaps his father might have felt that way too; perhaps by remembering James, he could create an internal sense of what a father’s pride might feel like, or even discover a memory of it. But for now, the one he imagined feeling what his father felt for him was Martina, and the thought was unbearable. She was the one who had seen him waver; the one who had seen him cry. For that, he could never forgive her, both for allowing him to spoil her regard for him, and for allowing him to spoil his father’s. He closed the book and sat up, looking around for her with red, angry eyes.

  When he scanned the far corner of the room by the kitchen, however, the person he found wasn’t Martina, her image or h
er voice or her smell, but Larry, whose presence made him even more nauseous, and filled him with an even greater intensity of rage. He could see him, bumbling and vulnerable, fighting for a life that anyone with a bit of perspective could see meant nothing, completely unprepared, if he wasn’t already dead, to make any contribution of the sort that would be worthy of pride. To sacrifice himself to save someone who wasn’t worth saving was the height of exploitation, its very definition. As it turned out, Jorge realized, he didn’t need the twenty-four hours Silvio and Joaquim had given him to think through the question of how much he was willing to do; the answer was so obvious that further thought could only cloud it, as opposed to making it more clear. He stood quickly and headed for the phone, but on his way, despite himself, further thought caught up and flooded him. The further thought was of Larry again, not of his face this time, but of the tracks his tears had left in the dust on his shoes as they sat side by side in the courtyard of the Museo. In that Larry, the one who, Quichotte-like, hurled himself against his destiny at any cost, he had seen another vision of himself, and something of the nobility in fighting losing battles. That was the point, purely by chance, at which his hand made contact with the phone, and there was nothing else to do but to pick up the receiver and dial.

  CXII

  THE FOREST CONTAINS endless stories, far too many for all the ancestors combined to tell, but it is not kind to the sorts of stories that are written in books. As if to avenge itself upon these usurpers, it attacked the pages of Larry’s few volumes with mold, their spines with mildew, and their covers with layers of spores that threatened to obscure even the most basic of their intentions in a spongy, foul-smelling slime. He spent much effort laying them out in the sun during dry times, flipping through their pages as though to inoculate them leaf by leaf, down to their darkest crevasses, against the coming rains. Despite the fact that in Pahquel, persons were deliberate in their blindness to his possessions, betraying no outward curiosity whatever toward his knife blade, obstinately looking past him when he drew out his compass or twine or metal nail file, they could not help but notice the way he treated those odd objects, with their fly-specks arranged neatly in rows like crops in tiny, sun-bleached fields. They mocked his way of turning pages, ridiculed his pacing eyes, and imitated with exaggerated flourishes his ritual of laying out his volumes at dawn like fish to be smoked and gathering them in at dusk. But of the fact that he often shed tears when he sat with them, and looked so deeply into them that he might as well have been studying the deepest part of the river’s floor, these things they didn’t mock. As he sat cross-legged on his kaawa, head bowed over the pages, they regarded him cautiously, and did not address him, suspecting somehow, the involvement of the ancestors in his absorption.

  One evening, while he was bowed in his usual posture, immersed in The Two Towers while the fire waned, Iri stumbled over to him and reached for the book, snatching it from him and laughing. Larry pulled it away, but without returning Iri’s laugh, which prompted a tantrum on Iri’s part, as he reached out with greater insistence, nearly tearing the paper.

  “Po po! Po po!” he shouted while Larry closed the book and held it aloft.

  “Pi pi,” Larry said, “Pi pi. You you. I’ll give it to you, but you have to be quiet and sit down.”

  At last, Iri stopped screaming and squatted beside him, sniffing and wiping his eyes. “This is a book,” said Larry, using the English word. “Letters,” he said, tracing Iri’s name in the dirt. “Iri.” He took Iri’s finger and spelled out I–R–I, sensing as he did that he was crossing some unspoken barrier, some necessarily impermeable membrane, and feeling suddenly afraid. Thus, he taught his child to read in the way all parents teach their children; by mistaking their resentment of the objects of their attention for the interest that over time, it becomes; by giving them the tools with which they will, inevitably, be betrayed. Only in Larry’s case, it wasn’t so clear whether in the process of teaching his son to read he was giving his son the world or taking it from him, drawing him in or setting the course for his expulsion from the only life he had.

  CIII

  SILVIO SAT IN Sara’s kitchen, drumming his finger on the phone, trying to get a connection to Rio. The Telepar was far more reliable, and vastly cheaper, but he refused to listen to Sara’s advice, and so wasted half the afternoon on cursing and pacing and haste. At first, Sara sat with him, but when she realized how little inclined he was to include her, she left him with a card containing her office phone number and a note saying she’d be home at 6. It wasn’t until an hour later that Silvio realized she was gone.

  The truth was that despite his insistence, Silvio wasn’t at all prepared to talk to Rio, or to Sao Paulo, or even to himself. The puppeteer was pulling too many strings, and was too tangled up in them himself to know which part would move when he pulled on any particular one. There was the prospect of losing his best agents and best friends, if not forever, then for what sufficed for forever in the context of his plans. There was the need to show that his agency was able to protect its own, and that he was able to monitor his men on the ground. There was the fact that he couldn’t trust anyone any more, and had come to feel, over the past year especially, that he was losing control of the strings, that there was something rotten at the core of at least half of what he had going in the field. There were the personal commitments, the promises to Joaquim, and retroactively to Marietto, and to James about Larry, and there were the legal fights, and the recent pressure from congressmen, Garapar and Redondimo and Diego Melo and too many others to name. There were decisions about which authorities to involve and when, and there was the sinking feeling that whatever decision he made, he would end up losing, and alone.

  When a voice came on the end of the line, he jumped and nearly dropped the receiver, having forgotten that he was still trying to place a call. He stuttered for a minute, trying to remember to whom he had been so desperate to talk, and then regained himself, relieved to find it was Maria, his secretary. Her voice was without its usual affectionate coloring though, and conveyed a sense of panic even from a thousand miles away.

  “I’ll be back on Saturday,” he barked at her in an effort to regain the upper hand.

  “No, now. You have no idea what’s happened in the past three days.”

  “Say it.”

  “Arturo witnessed two flybys in two days, both infected clothing drops and their chief was on to it. You need to go see Arturo. He barely got out alive—two broken ribs and about twenty grazings, some of them agented. He was lucky. You need to get somebody here now.”

  Silvio was silent on his end of the line. He could feel his lungs folding in on themselves, as though he himself had taken the curared arrows, while his mind raced around his chest like gulls around a tall ship, binding its sails with rope. “I’m going to need an attraction team down here in Santarem,” he said at last, summoning sufficient air to speak. “I want you to pull in Valerio and Lino, and have them out here by tomorrow. Tell them to come to 11 Rua Galdino Valoso when they get here.”

  “But what about Arturo?”

  “Pull in Marco and his crew. Have them ready. I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

  Maria, at least, he could trust. He hung up the receiver and began to pace again, between the kitchen and Sara’s front door, through the front room with its stacks of books, its artifacts and rumpled throw rugs. At last, he paused before an end table, which held an open book and a thick stack of photographs. He picked up a few off the stack and waved them in front of his eyes as if trying to get his own attention, in an effort to distract his mind from its sickness. When Sara walked in at a quarter to six, that was how she found him, transfixed on the spot by the sofa, holding before his eyes an image of another time.

  CXIV

  IT TOOK FOUR of the largest barcas to hold all the crates and furniture and servants and still leave room for the oarsmen to maneuver. Sr. Catalpa stood with difficulty at the stern of the last in that line of gilded elephants that b
obbed and snorted and shifted impatiently, looking back at his already unfamiliar former home. From this distance, the house seemed more gracious than ever, as though it had in retrospect, finally attained the aspect of enchantment that had eluded it in service. He could barely bring himself to wave his handkerchief towards the clutches of natives gathered on the dock and at the shore who, he knew, would swarm that beautiful carcass as soon as the last of their caravan was out of sight. Instead, he raised his hand and brought it to his lips, blowing kiss after kiss at the cheek of a mistress as flattered by distance as the mistresses of his youth had been flattered by the dark. “Adeus! Adeus!” he cried, leaning forward as the barcas creaked and jolted, surprised at the clutch in his throat. Only when he reminded himself that the house had recently been tainted, and that the Sodeis problem had also been definitively left behind, did he pull his eyes from the shrinking gem at the horizon and avail himself of the limp bread-and-cheese sandwich that Gabriel stood offering him on a cracked Wedgwood plate.

  CXV

  JOAQUIM KNEW WHEN to press an issue and when to let it go, and also how to get his way regardless. When he heard Sara move around in the kitchen, he got up quietly, closing the door of Jorge’s room, where Silvio still slept, as he passed by on his way down the hall. By the time he had pulled out a chair to sit down at the kitchen table, Sara had already placed a steaming mug of coffee in front of him.

  “Sleep well?”

  “No,” said Joaquim, who was known as a good sleeper.

  “Tensions are high,” said Sara, sitting down across from him.

  “From all sides,” said Joaquim.